Comment by dspillett
5 days ago
> but the craft - Do you like fine Japanese woodworking? All hand tools and sashimono joinery? Me too. Do it on your own time.
That is not my objection, though some seem to think it is.
I got into coding because I found it interesting and fun. I've avoided managing others because I hate that sort of thing. Working with an LLM, prompting it to do work then assessing that work and adjusting the prompts or cleaning/completing the output myself, is far too much like outsourcing work to a 3rd party junior, and I don't want to do that whether said junior is a human in a far off land (or just down the street, for all I know!) or some LLM run by MegaCorp-ᴙ-Us.
I was already seriously disliking much of the modern programming industry (remote teams, the shit-show that client-side web work continues to devolve into, and much else) anyway. If it gets to the point where I can't do my job (or can't do it competitively enough) without using LLMs on top of dealing with the other things I don't care for, I'll be retraining for something else entirely. Heck, I've got the mortgage paid, I don't have or plan to have a family beyond the cats, I could just about survive on shelf-stacking…
I know it isn't a passing fad, though I'm convinced the current and near-future iterations aren't going to be quite as significant in the longer term as many believe. I don't object to others using it (aside from the matter of “MegaCorp-ᴙ-Us”s of the world suddenly deciding that piracy is just fine because they stand to benefit from it, in fact are already benefitting from it, in this case). But I don't plan to be nagged into using it myself.
> Do it on your own time.
If/when that career shift happens, or I survive as I am long enough to retire, I will probably do exactly that. As it stands I spend more than enough of my life on tech in DayJob, my own time is increasingly filled with unrelated hobbies and people.
No comments yet
Contribute on Hacker News ↗